


Popinjays

by filia_noctis



Category: Night Watch - Sarah Waters
Genre: Depression, F/F, Post-Canon, Post-War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-16
Updated: 2015-03-16
Packaged: 2018-03-18 05:17:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,449
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3557429
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/filia_noctis/pseuds/filia_noctis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The end of the war.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Popinjays

**Author's Note:**

  * For [toujours_nigel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/gifts).



> Somewhat unbeta-ed, I'm afraid.

   Julia never lets this slip, but some of her better plots come from nightmares. Bloody resourceful of her. How Mother would laugh.

   She dreams of friends dead in alleys, her father flattened by a pile of rubble, diluted penicillin in the hands of an especially affable nurse, a slowly rotting floorboard soaking up the turbid gurgles of a leaky sewer, pastes of jewellery stolen, killed for, lost, mothball ridden furs, a slow drying up of heirlooms and thinning out of cousins, friends, friends beginning to be acquaintances, acquaintances beginning to be strangers; the blood on Helen’s fingers, upper arms, legs (even in the dreams there is resentment and self-mocking laughter about sharing Kay’s nightmares, but oh so differently), Helen’s finally receding figure, boxes falling, falling with a crash. Does the nurse slip? Should the laudanum go in the lining of the suitcase under her bed? No. Too easy. A champagne flute! Or, a sachet of aspirin. How does one smuggle it from outside? A switch? Of course. And the inspector could be smoking a pipe instead of cigarettes, with the pipe tobacco laced all this while. The inspector grins as he cleans his pipe. Charlie. Charlie and his grins and smells of gun oil. An overturned bottle of wine over Nan’s favourite rug. Laughter. Laughter. Someone toppling over a sofa they were laughing that hard. Tobacco in a quaint, beautifully oriental leather pouch monogrammed “KL”. A birthday cake and Kay’s face. Bristol. The bridge. Kay’s fingers hooked to a coffin nail while Kay tries to blow smoke in exaggerated grace, only to cough her lungs out and hiccup with laughter, Richard looking for smoke behind Kay’s ears, sprawled across a settee, Helen watching Julia watching Kay...

   She jerks awake with a headache, with the blood still thrumming in her ears, her hand raised, her body stiff—like she was about to take a plunge but got shoved into an ice bucket instead—and her first coherent thought is , “Oh but I _hate_ how hungrily she always looked!”                                                                                                                                                                                                      No less than you at times, her half asleep mind is still quick to retort, but it is no worse than a dull stab around her temples.

 

      

 

   And yet, Julia thinks after she groans her way out of bed (war etches scars on one’s bones, and in a few years she will actually have a body as unsuited to breeding as her mind, isn’t that a strange thought?); she hasn’t many things to be proud of, but thankfully, pride has always numbered in her sins. Starved of Kay she has been, randomly, wantonly; but naked hunger never predated her eyes so. She never slipped. Not even when that pipe grazed her head days before the chance meeting with Kay and Helen in the park.

   She had rushed to work—they were dreadfully short-staffed, and there was an emergency, as usual—in a turban to ward off the unbearable, stuttering, vaguely apologetic and alternately arrogant commiserations of strangers at the sight of her half-shaved, bandaged head. Kay though she had claims on worth a third of her lifetime. And Kay would have bullied her back home, stood guard as her personal watchdog every minute off duty for the next week, in her bedroom, with a pot of soup. The soup would probably have been made by Helen. Anecdotes, forced cheer, maddening, barely suppressed worry, open affection. Professionally intimate nursing touches, awkward, averted glances at a bed they had both shared. The last two she couldn’t have stomached. So, she had turned aggressively, preternaturally familiar enough to be a half-stranger. The unremarkable girl-who-was-to-become Helen, the Helen she tried sharing her life with, who she had already managed to make an impression on, she couldn’t bear to look at, not really. Kay’s ladylove, the one who blunt all of Kay’s sharp edges so Kay’d only smile and never mock around her, as her new besotted fan was a pummeling thought. She should have confessed the vertigo and pain and let Kay take her home, scolding.

       Instead, she had smiled sharp and sure, and looked at them with brittle, marble eyes that made Kay narrow hers and then turn inscrutable, quiet. _Blank_.

       Julia could’ve wept for vicious joy on her way back, careful to maintain her swagger way beyond it was necessary. Better to appear petty, jealously condescending rather than in need of dutiful, ever solicitous Kay with her day in the park with her sweetheart ruined. She didn’t want a White Knight that day, nor the burden of summoning one so obliging but uneasy. She had relished Kay’s ignorance in the face of Kay’s bliss too much. It would have left bruises to have done things differently.

       _Maudlin, are we?_

Julia has always reserved the most unkind smiles in her repertoire for herself. She finds herself eye-to-eye with one of her finest in the mirror.

This will never do. Not today.

 

      

 

   She shivers her face in the depths of the washcloth Betty thoughtfully hangs next to the closet. Good girl, that one. It’s good to have a maid again.

   She picks the hairbrush, then discards it in favour of the powder, paints her mouth a wine red, darkens her eyes until they appear hooded. Her mind feels as wiped a slate as Kay’s face that day. What does she expect of today, really?

That’s when she hears the knocking. Her new apartment comes with a charwoman who will, in an emergency, be the maid she used to want to be before “things got difficult”. Julia remembers her gentle mockery falling flat before Betty’s joy at the passably serviceable housemaid’s gowns found at the bottom of one of the old trunks.

“Miss Langrish in the sitting room, Ma’am.”

Julia stands up.

“Betty, some tea for us, please.”

She turns back to the mirror after the door closes behind Betty. Her cheekbones have been jutting out for some time, but they seem particularly, stubbornly visible today. She gives up on them. It’s too early for colour. In an inexplicable rush though, she rids herself of the pyjamas in favour of the old muslin kaftan. A step closer to Miss Havisham perhaps, but on some mornings flamboyance and flippancy are all a girl has. She wants to look interrupted, she decides.

 

 

 

 

“A quaint little piece you have there.”

Kay in her shirt fronts lounging in front of her radio looks relaxed enough, but she can see the coiled spring behind the white knuckles, the slight tremor in the fingers cupping the smoke, the over-emphasised languor.

“Not quaint at all. Betty has been a factory-girl these past few years. But she has always wanted to be a “proper” ladies’ maid, as she calls it. I don’t mind her playing.”

“Ladies’ maid at the genteel establishment of the sensational lady mystery author Honourable Ms. Julia Standing. How absolutely thrilling.” Kay swirls the words around her mouth like she swirls cigarette smoke, and Julia suddenly wants to claw her smooth, depreciating face out for turning Betty into the fashionable, pet monkey of a Regency dowager.

“To each her own. She’s a good girl.”

Julia opts for the hard-backed chair by the window.

“I suppose white lace aprons and stiff collars make it easier to pretend like nothing is really changed. Like the war didn’t really happen.”

“Is that how you feel? Everyone is trying to pretend away the last few years?” Julia feels a flicker of curiosity, because the alternative is Kay in her living room at ten o’ clock in the morning with a metaphorical cattle prod.

“Pretending. Or stuck.” Kay stubs the cigarette in the closest ashtray. Julia blankly observes how the thin, bone-white wrist bends to reduce the embers into mere ash in their smudgy, sticky, dark grey flakes.

Julia’s retort is sharper than she intended.

“She’s hardly a Miss Havisham. If the game makes her chores more palatable, why not? They are mundane enough as they are, all day, every day.”

Kay shoots her a shard of a glance. “Is that the socialist in you talking?” Her drawl is one of bored amusement.

Julia is suddenly very tired of parlour tricks and paper games.

“I don’t know. We do what we do to get through the day,” she looks up at Kay, “All of us”.

It comes out limp, flat, empty. Julia’s criminals sometimes sound like that.

“Tell me, who acquired who?”

She forgets the casual cruelties Kay is good at inflicting, seemingly without thought or effort. It feels a tad bit anticlimactic after all the apprehensive waiting spent on this day.

“We both acquired each other.”

Julia settles in her haunches. She needs tea, a shot of whiskey. Kay in her sitting room is more invasive and grueling than she had bargained for.

“I thought we are meeting at Piccadilly, at eleven,” she continues, “You caught me—” she waves a hand vaguely at her kaftan, unsure of her new boundaries.

“I was restless. I decided to take a walk. When I wound up here I didn’t want to bother with looking for a cafe. Do you mind terribly?”

“No.”

The silence stretches. Julia is quiet, attentive, but this is not a dance she wishes to lead. Kay is eventually restless, and takes a tour of the room.

“Nice place you’ve got here. May I?”

She nods.

The door right across the hallway opens to Betty’s bedroom. Kay shuts it quickly: surprised, erred, livid at her for granting access. She probably expected the tumbled mess of Julia's study, Julia realises. Poor Kay, she decides, always such a stickler for privacy.

“We both have nightmares. She prefers to be woken up. Easier to stumble short distances in the dark.”

“Is this a Sapphic establishment?” Kay asks bluntly. For all her jeers, Kay will always remain the one more invested in social justice. Julia suppresses amusement. It feels good to do so.

“Very much. But Betty doesn’t seem to mind. She had a dyke neighbour once, apparently. She has her afternoons off to meet her fellow. I’m not sure about asking him in, though.”

She tilts her head and watches Kay’s eyes go opaque.

When it comes down to brass tacks, Kay only has so much patience and finesse as a fourteen year old school boy, eventually. And she thinks they have finally hit "eventually" when Kay bursts out, “Look!,” she could be spurting, how odd. “Mickey insisted that we meet. Some nonsense about closure. If this is the only way I get to drag her out of London—But. How are you? You seem to be doing well enough, but you look dreadfully sickly. _Are_ you doing well enough?”

Julia looks at her and decides she doesn’t have the urge to manufacture enough cool hauteur and distance any more. She is exhausted: has been for a decade, all of it bowing her down another inch every year. She isn’t Christian enough to know whether she has sufficient, if any, remorse. Unlike her detective-inspectors, she isn’t civic-minded enough to know whether she has paid her debts. She just knows she is tired to her bones, and her head feels like one of the drafty rubble heaps of buildings she had to camp in during the war. There has been a dead weight growing in her mind for the past decade that had  so far registered only as an inevitably effect of time, and she wants a slice of it gone. Twenty years back she would have laughed with Kay at the thrill of grief and guilt and heartbreak and friendship. Now, there is only deadening exhaustion and the very visceral pain down the length of her spine.

So she decides to not weigh her answers and stares into Kay’s flat, baleful stare. She, after all, is unrelieved of any expectation of Kay offering her deliverance.

“I am tired. I know there should be grief and guilt there, I don’t know. Can’t tell. I sleep hoping my bones will erode away and take my head with them. Dramatic, I know. But I wake up with all of it just as heavy and latched on to me still. I wish I could sleep for aeons. It would be simple to blame it all on insomnia and psychosis.

No, I don’t believe people can be stolen. Pilfering has never been one of my virtues. So I don't feel guilty enough. Yes, I have lost some. So has everybody. Yes, I am trying to work on it, so nobody has to worry about me walking off the curb.” She has a small smile. “Too much pride, I’m afraid.”

Kay’s eyes soften.

“Was it revenge, with Helen?” she asks softly, like she’d have forgiven Julia if it was. Julia isn’t fooled, but she answers bluntly enough.

“With Helen? Never to spite you. It began as a kindness to her. A deliberated act of good will to you.” Julia pauses.

“I was disappointed about us, for sure. There was some rankling at first to see you leave and look so unregretful, _happy_ with somebody else: somebody _inferior_ , or so it felt.” So _easy_ to please and be pleased, she had thought to herself. “But it passed. Eventually, it only took about a couple nights of heavy drinking and the Sapphic chaise-lounge, really. After that,” she swallows, and notices Kay’s eyes drop and fixate on her throat before climbing up to her face again, “I did not want to lose you completely. Befriending Helen would have saved the friendship. I was prickly. I imagined the annoyed ranting to Charlotte or Lorna I would occasionally seek respite in, over wine, about your declining tastes, Helen’s crass dullness, the trial of spending an entire day with you and your paramour.”

She is aware that she is sitting very straight, in her kaftan and made up face with jutting cheekbones—like she is at an Inquest.

“It didn’t go as planned, did it?” she laughs. It isn’t a happy sound, so Kay isn’t offended or enraged, she notes dispassionately. “Helen was so... worshipful. She latched on to me at once. She was a curiosity to begin with, but not for long. When we took walks, she would steal glances sideways when she thought I didn’t notice. She was so hungry for anything I cared to put her way! I confess a grim humour when I saw she was more forbearing with you than that, but it didn’t mean much, initially. Truth be told, it was annoying. I don’t enjoy collecting devotees, much less being a trophy. Fan letters are bad enough.

But I discovered I had grown to like our conversations. She was such a new, untarnished, wide-eyed thing, like a new ha’penny coin. She was...refreshing after the tired banter of the old circles, I suppose. I began to see why you were so smitten. I grew fond of her. I noticed how I could fluster her, but Kay, it doesn’t mean anything. Flirting is a kindness we all invest in: it is easy. It is the acceptable, non-offensive camaraderie for strangers from such different walks. It is the one language we _can_ share. It is reassuring. Whatever Helen was doing didn’t register much: at worst, it was an infatuation, and I assumed she was waiting for it to wane so she could stop making a fool of herself. She had you.

As for that night,” she continues doggedly. Now that she has started, she won’t stop. One slice less, she remembers. She is beginning to lose the crispness of her voice. Where the hell is the tea?

“Blame it on me. Blame it on her. Blame it on our nerves. I won’t offer excuses.”

There is a knock. Betty finally comes in with the tray and tries explaining something about the creamer, flushed and sweaty. Kay favours her with a rare smile, but she waits for Julia’s nod to look truly relieved and excuses herself.

Kay turns back to her, “I won’t pretend it was easy, but I hoped you two would stick. Sorry it failed. It sounds strange, I know.” The short jittery sentences don’t sound like Kay.

   Julia laughs hysterically, “I tried. I have seen relationships working on far less. I wanted it to work, but, she was so _hungry,_ it was like she never got over the furtiveness of the first few months. It was stifling. I didn’t cheat on her. The idea had no particular appeal for me, but she was always petrified I’d meet somebody and leave. I couldn’t reassure her enough.” Kay, face drawn, nods without realising. “Eventually, I decided to save our sanities when I couldn’t stop her from hurting herself. We fell apart. I called it off, but never as a successful experiment in enraged jealousy. You were the Banquo haunting both of us in very different ways, I imagine. I am sorry. This can’t be an easy conversation for you.”

Kay shrugs and looks down at her cup.

“What now?” she asks quietly.

Julia slumps like a hawk folding its wings around itself on a perch.

“I don’t know. I know it hurt you and if you hate me now, I probably will have earned it.” Kay smiles to herself at that, she can’t say why. Kay’s eyes are dark pools of pain, she really ought to stop.

“Meanwhile,” she plods on, rebellious to the end, “Since the last time we spoke, we have lost Laura, Boyd, Charlie, Katie, the old house, and at least a dozen others between us. I have what the quacks are calling war fever, you look like you didn’t manage to escape it either.” Too twitchy for Kay, nerves and rage be damned, her brain keeps telling her.But this bit needs to be said, nonetheless.

“I want you to know—” Kay looks up. Julia's eyes don't waver.

“I take full responsibility for my actions. But I don’t think I would have done anything any differently if given a second chance.”

She closes her eyes, spent, and leans back. The chair is unhelpful, but will have to do. Kay has to decide how she likes that piece of knowledge. She longs for her bed, and the quiet whisper of sheets. But for once, she imagines the exhaustion to have been well-earned. When she opens them a minute later, Kay is still watching her, eyes shuttered.

The close scrutiny feels like a half-forgotten but well-favoured book. She stares back. She hopes her gaze doesn’t look like a caress.

“Go, wash your face. You look like the world’s worst batty ingénue. I will take you to lunch.”

Kay stands up abruptly, her voice crackling like a whip. Julia doesn’t flinch.

“Helen lives with a friend in Bond Street. I can give you her address if you wish, and Mickey insists,” she counters.

The crinkles beginning to form around Kay’s eyes stall for a moment, then resume. “Funny, Mickey only insisted I meet you.” The voice is light, too light.

“She did?”

“No time for the harpy from the woods, only the double-crossing wench. I quote her verbatim.” Kay’s hands are stuffed inside her pockets, she can’t say if the palms are balled. Kay’s eyes are on the street. “I know a decent pub a couple blocks away. You have five minutes.”

“So you can poison my drink?” Julia hazards.

That makes Kay’s eyes rivet back. of course.

“I am still not entirely sure whether I don’t want to.” She can see nothing but honesty in those Grecian eyes, but she can also trace humour. It is slightly baffling.

“Arsenic?” The word is out of her very dry lips before she realises. Her mind flies to remember yellow light, a sofa she has since disposed of, the soft music from a radio, their endless puzzling over a series of fictive crimes and their respective loopholes while other, tedious souls puzzled over crosswords, or the trade of food coupons.

The eyes stay humoured, but begin to look baleful. “I will still have to profess a partiality for strychnine, I’m afraid. _Four_ minutes.”

“How bad is Mickey?” She couldn’t risk asking before. Kay could’ve hit her, or worse, left.

“We have a chance if we act fast.” There is always a glint in Kay’s eyes when she goes White Knight, even, _especially_ for friends. The glint would have been there if Julia had ruined that day in the park for them. On most days, Julia loathes the glint.  Julia will never say any of this aloud because she doesn’t want to get socked in her stomach.

It is good to see.

“Give me two.” Julia stumbles in her hurry, but the door frame is sufficiently steadying.

She will take things as they come, but take things she will.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for dropping by!
> 
> Not a native of England, nor a primary speaker of the tongue. Constructive criticism about anachronistic details and other errors are deeply appreciated. :)


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